Yuan Yao (active mid-18th century)

signed Hanshang Yuan Yao, dated guihai (1743), summer, with two seals of the artist, yuan yao zhi yin, zhao dao shi; with two other collectors' seals, jin ju, and one other illegible

Beijing Council, Classical Chinese Paintings, Dec. 5, 2010, Lot 0998

Note: Like his uncle Yuan Jiang, who established the family’s extensive Yangzhou workshop, Yuan Yao served as an imperial atelier painter during the early Qianlong period; but most of his better work, much of which bears the evidence of having been painted by a number of assistants, was painted for upwardly mobile merchants, as recreations of Song dynasty “lord mountain” compositions.  This huge landscape, Travelers on the Cantilevered Road to Shu (Sichuan), painted on a single piece of silk measuring six feet high by eight feet wide (extremely rare, if not unprecedented) is much more intimately organic than the great majority of his works, with details freely brushed in the manner of a literati painter, suggesting that it was painted all by the hand of the master. Paintings on a grand scale executed by uncle, nephew and workshop across twelve hanging scrolls are more common, many of them featuring architectural detail of fanciful palaces; it is clear from close inspection that the architectural detail of even the best of those works was largely accomplished by workshop assistants.  Here the single piece of material, somehow obtained, and employed for one uninterrupted view, allowed the painter to create a highly unusual set of shifting perspectives, providing enough depth in more than one dimension for the eye to travel far behind the central mountain mass, to left and to right of it, permitting a degree of three-dimensionality rarely seen in Chinese landscape painting since the monumental works of the Song dynasty.  It is not only the scale of the painting which accounts for its impact, but the depth of field into relatively empty space on either side of its central, eternally climbing peak, that defines its unusually effective dominant presence.

In addition, the composition affords a wealth of varied detail, ranging from large trees and figures in the foreground near the bottom of the painting, receding markedly in scale as one ascends, thus holding the careful viewer’s attention and providing evidence that the details were scientifically plotted out at the painting’s inception.  Allowing for the two main areas of empty space which define the central mass, there is no point at which the roving eye is not seized and pulled in by the quality and variety of secondary details, many of which represent  tantalizing sub-themes of their own.  From random groups of travellers to temples perched on or over precipices (one of them reminiscent of the architectural conceptions of Wu Bin, arch-fantasist of the late Ming) to the perilous yet ingenious construction of old Chinese roadways, the painting’s story-telling dimension cleverly holds the attention for as long as one is capable of wandering around its surface.